Digital Art Community Forum for Artists & Creators

Username: artsketch
Post Date: 2025-12-20 17:18:13

Hi, I'm currently using an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and Rebelle 8 Pro. Rebelle is very powerful and effective, but what about better-equipped Macs? Does anyone use a Mac mini with newer Apple Silicon and more RAM? Pro, Max or Apple Studio? Does 16GB, 24GB, or more ram make a big difference? It would be great to hear about your experiences.

Username: Bruce Herbes
Post Date: 2026-01-07 07:48:05

Hi, along the same lines as the above question... Can the developers please please clarify if Rebelle benefits from the Pro & Max chips. For example does Rebelle make full use of 20 GPU cores?? or more CPU cores or both? Or is larger memory the optimal way to go? This would really help inform Mac hardware buying decisions for Rebelle use. I'm currently using M1 14 Macbook pro with 16Gig - performance is good, but does lag a bit with oil brushes, not so much with express brushes.

Username: Veronika Escape Motions
Post Date: 2026-01-14 10:12:23

Hi guys, Rebelle uses multiple threads, but its performance doesn't grow linearly with the number of CPU cores. The performance increase in Rebelle is largest going from a single-core CPU to 2 cores, lower from 2 cores to 4 cores, even lower from 4 cores to 8 cores. So it is not that important to have 16 cores, but 4 cores 8 threads are good to have. Rebelle can definitely benefit from more RAM. We recommend having 16GB, but having 32 GB is even better for most of the Rebelle processes. The amount of required RAM in Rebelle depends on: - Artwork's size in pixels - Layers count - Undo steps count and size of strokes or affected regions in those undo steps

Username: artsketch
Post Date: 2026-01-15 09:32:31

Thank you very for the explanation, Veronica. That means any Apple M CPU would be suitable, and more RAM is particularly most important. Unfortunately, you can't limit the undo steps, and working with a smaller canvas and then using Nano Pixel export to enlarge it doesn't help much, as the paper/canvas texture is also enlarged. That's a problem given the price of RAM.

Username: artsketch
Post Date: 2026-01-19 06:18:11

Has anyone tried Rebelle on an M1 Max Mac Studio?

Username: artsketch
Post Date: 2026-01-19 09:06:51

Or the M5? Did Rebelle Pro achieve significant performance improvements with Metal 4? It would be great if we could get more details, as the performance and choice of the right Apple Silicon chips to get for Rebelle Pro remains a mystery. Is there a significant difference between the new M5 and M4 with Metal 3?

Username: Michal Escape Motions
Post Date: 2026-01-26 15:31:16

[B]GPU[/B] When the RealShader is turned on in Visual Settings, Rebelle uses OpenGL with some complex shaders, also for NanoPixel. Otherwise it only uses CPU. It doesn't use Metal at all, so it doesn't matter whether your GPU has Metal 3 or 4. GPU performance is mainly needed when the whole viewport is rendered. Normally, with RealShader on, when you paint a stroke, only the area under the currently painted stroke part is rendered on GPU which is usually quite a small area which also less performant GPUs handle well. [B]CPU[/B] To get an idea about the performance difference on various CPUs you can look at performance benchmarks of those CPUs, but of course that's just an approximate. Single thread performance is more relevant than multi-thread performance in those benchmarks. Brush lag mainly depends on the CPU, brush size, spacing and lots of other brush settings. [B]RAM[/B] To get an idea about how much RAM you need, open your system's task manager and monitor the amount of RAM used by Rebelle with a new artwork of your preferred size, then open some of your saved artworks with multiple layers. It's hard to tell how much RAM is ideal for you as it strongly depends on your particular work syle and use cases.

Username: artsketch
Post Date: 2026-01-26 19:08:20

Thanks, Michal. That helps a lot. Based on this information, it seems unnecessary to invest in an older Mac Studio with an M1 or M2 Max processor. These devices primarily excel in GPU performance, which is not necessary for Rebelle Pro. However, as older M series processors, they have significantly lower single-core CPU performance than newer M and M Pro processors.